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Comcast Bandwidth Limit Shouldn’t Affect Streaming Media Needs
The 250GB limit per household starts October 1. A less-than-one-hour-long HD TV show will be between 1GB and 2GB.
Comcast says a less-than-one-hour-long HD TV show will only be between 1GB and 2GB.
Will Comcast's 250GB-per-month limit be a death knell for downloading HD content from Vudu and iTunes 8, or even SD content from Netflix?
I don’t think so.
Among the conversations at CEDIA Expo 2008 last week was the ongoing battle between physical media and streaming digital downloads.
Rich Green of Rich Green Ink said he gives Blu-ray “three more years” before the format starts losing ground to streaming devices like Apple TV and Vudu.
Not so fast, say others, pointing directly to Comcast's announcement that it will be enforcing its monthly bandwidth limit of 250GB per household starting October 1.
The big question for integrators is how will this affect them if they pushed a client into an IPTV box like Apple TV or Vudu?
Will customers not be able to stream HD movies because they do a lot of legal downloads like iTunes music, software updates or Netflix movies? The short answer is “no.”
A less-than-one-hour-long HD TV show will only be between 1GB and 2GB. That means your client will have to download 125 or more TV shows in one month to surpass the limit (if he only uses the computer for downloading movies).
Comcast equates the 250GB limit to:
The cap covers all downloading activity, not just movies and TV shows.
If a customer exceeds the limit, he will receive a call from Comcast’s Customer Security Assurance Group. If the customer violates the limit twice in six months, the service will be subject to shut off for one year.
Comcast has an FAQ page that defines “excessive use” that answers almost all the questions a consumer might have, including why it instituted the policy.
I don’t think so.
Among the conversations at CEDIA Expo 2008 last week was the ongoing battle between physical media and streaming digital downloads.
Rich Green of Rich Green Ink said he gives Blu-ray “three more years” before the format starts losing ground to streaming devices like Apple TV and Vudu.
Not so fast, say others, pointing directly to Comcast's announcement that it will be enforcing its monthly bandwidth limit of 250GB per household starting October 1.
The big question for integrators is how will this affect them if they pushed a client into an IPTV box like Apple TV or Vudu?
Will customers not be able to stream HD movies because they do a lot of legal downloads like iTunes music, software updates or Netflix movies? The short answer is “no.”
A less-than-one-hour-long HD TV show will only be between 1GB and 2GB. That means your client will have to download 125 or more TV shows in one month to surpass the limit (if he only uses the computer for downloading movies).
Comcast equates the 250GB limit to:
- Sending 50 million emails (at 0.05KB/email)
- Downloading 62,500 songs (at 4MB/song)
- Downloading 125 standard-definition movies (at 2GB/movie)
- Uploading 25,000 hi-resolution digital photos (at 10MB/photo)
The cap covers all downloading activity, not just movies and TV shows.
If a customer exceeds the limit, he will receive a call from Comcast’s Customer Security Assurance Group. If the customer violates the limit twice in six months, the service will be subject to shut off for one year.
Comcast has an FAQ page that defines “excessive use” that answers almost all the questions a consumer might have, including why it instituted the policy.
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About the Author
Jason Knott, Editor, CE Pro
Jason has covered low-voltage electronics as an editor since 1990. He joined EH Publishing in 2000, and before that served as publisher and editor of Security Sales, a leading magazine for the security industry. He served as chairman of the Security Industry Association’s Education Committee from 2000-2004 and sat on the board of that association from 1998-2002. He is also a former board member of the Alarm Industry Research and Educational Foundation. He is currently a member of the CEDIA Education Action Team for Electronic Systems Business. Jason graduated from the University of Southern California.
2 Comments (displayed in order by date/time)
Something else is up with them now. I can no longer stream video from Amazon’s Video On Demand that is watchable. Data runs out about every 5 - 10 seconds and the compression that Comcast performs makes the image look like a 2nd generation VHS image (that was recorded in SLP mode).
Fortunately, we have cable competition where I live.
Page 1 of 1 comment pages
Jason there are two separate issues here:
The first is the issue of size of HDTV shows that Comcast is quoting is ridiculously low as in my experience with my Series 3 TIVO which allows me via TIVO transfer to see the file Sizes of the shows that I have recorded from my TIVO and the average file size, from Cablevision cable cards as a source, is 6.5GB per hour.
The four hour Olympic Opening ceremony was a whopping 32 GB.
I had to add the 500GB drive before the Olympics just to keep up and I would have easily exceeded the 250 GB limit just on my HDTV programming alone.
Second and larger issue is that will affect VUDU and all other IPTV video content ids the deliberate throttling down of video specific packets by Comcast and other major cable companies resulting in inordinately long times to download video based content.
The fact is that altought the internet offerings of the cable companies have beeen up to now been very profitable for the Cable companies consumer interenet downloadable contnent is in direct comettion with the Cabl companies own VOD services which are also a big source of revenue for the cable companies.
The bottom line is I would not trust much of anything the cable companies say publicly anymore about not limiting bandwidth of video based content and expect to see slower and slower speeds of download along with surcharges for over the alloted bandwidth per month to become just as common in the next year as the extra luggage fees that the airlines have now imposed.
What is a customer going to do if cable is their only source, they kind have you over a barrel.
Andrew